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Senthil Todadri

Assistant Professor of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Email: senthil@mit.edu
Address: 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 12-110
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307.
Phone: (617) 253-6831


  • Related Links:
    Condensed Matter Physics at MIT.

    Click here for my cv and publication list.


  • Group members
  • Predrag Nicolic (graduate student)
  • Dinesh Raut (graduate student)
  • Mara S. Daniel 9undergraduate student)
  • Olexei Motrunich (post-doc)
  • Ashvin Vishwanath (Pappalardo Fellow)




  • Research Interests

    In the last several
    years, a number of materials have been found whose properties do not seem to
    fit in simply with conventional theories of the physics of solids. Striking
    examples are the materials that display the remarkable phenomenon of high-temperature
    superconductivity, but there are many others as well. Strong interactions between
    the electrons in the solid and/or the presence of impurities play a crucial
    role in determining the properties of these materials. My research interests
    are in understanding theoretically the phenomena that could and do arise in
    such circumstances.

    More specifically, my most recent interests have been in exploring the possibility
    that the excitations in some such solids have quantum numbers that are fractions
    of those of the electron. Put loosely, the electron has been broken apart! I
    have also worked on the theory of electron localization due to impurities in
    various circumstances, and the properties of solids near zero temperature phase
    transitions driven by quantum fluctuations.

  • Biographical Sketch
    I joined MIT in January
    2001 as an Assistant Professor of Physics. Before that, I spent a few years
    as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara,
    CA. My graduate degree is from Yale University , and my undergraduate degree is from the
    Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur .

  • Selected Publications
    1. Exotic order in simple models of bosonic systems, O. Motrunich and T. Senthil, Phys. Rev. Lett., 89, 277004 (2002).
    2. Fractionalization,
      topological order, and cuprate superconductivity, T. Senthil and Matthew P.A. Fisher, Phys. Rev B63, 134521 (2001).
    3. Z_2 gauge theory of electron fractionalization in strongly correlated systems, T. Senthil and Matthew P.A. Fisher, Phys. Rev. B62, 7850 (2000).
    4. Quasiparticle transport and localization in high-T_c
      superconductors, T. Senthil, Matthew P.A. Fisher, Leon Balents, Chetan Nayak,
      Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 4704 (1998).
    5. Higher dimensional realizations of activated dynamic scaling at random quantum transitions, T. Senthil and Subir Sachdev, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5292 (1996).





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